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Three versions of Nadsat: English, French & Spanish

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of Nadsat in one way only. After all, most of us only read the novel in one language, whether Burgess’s original, or else in one of the more than fifty extant translations. But of course, each of those translations represents a variant of Nadsat. Some languages have hosted multiple Nadsats, sometimes even by the same translator, as our colleague Patrick Corness has noted in relation to Robert Stiller’s multiple Polish-Nadsats.

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Posted on by Benet Vincent

The Lady in the Lake, a rat behind the arras and the meaning of ‘translation’

Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!

Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Monty Python inadvertently touched on a major debate among translation theorists, as raised in Umberto Eco’s thought-provoking and entertaining book Mouse or Rat. Eco makes much of his guilt at having to criticise Roman Jakobson for potentially causing ‘confusion’ in his 1959 article ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ (a piece notable enough to merit its own Wikipedia article).

According to Jakobson, any particular word may be interpreted, or translated, in three ways:

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